Thursday, September 30, 2010

Hibernia Atlantic’s new trans-Atlantic submarine cable will shave 5 milliseconds or more off the return-path latency between New York and London. The lowest-latency trans-Atlantic cable currently active, Global Crossing’s AC-1, can deliver latency of 60.8 milliseconds to the western point of England from New York. Connecting AC-1 onward to London costs a few additional milliseconds. By contrast, Hibernia’s new Project Express cable promises to allow sub-60 ms latency from New York all the way to greater London.

“Financial institutions engaged in high-velocity trading are speed demons,” noted TeleGeography VP of Research Tim Stronge. “They claim that shaving off just a few milliseconds of connectivity between two trading locations can earn them tens of millions of dollars a year, so they’re willing to pay extra for the fastest path.”

Bandwidth prices across the Atlantic remain among the lowest in the world. According to TeleGeography’s Bandwidth Pricing Database, the median price of a 10 Gbps wavelength between New York and London is approximately $10,500 per month, compared with $230,000 for the same amount of capacity between Miami and Brazil. By building along a unique, low-latency path, Hibernia aims to break out of the trans-Atlantic commodity pricing prison.